LADDER ON FIRE
Every Bohemian fairytale I have read starts off with a man who has too many kids and too little money; money which he impulse buys a rope with to kill himself, only to be interrupted by the devil or a fairy. I tell Emma this as we walk along the narrow streets, intermittently warding off the hawkers and their colorful candy. Candy reminds Emma of her kid and she has stopped acknowledging their existence by now. I tell her she's crazy. It's because I like her that I tell her these things.
She asks me, "Why are you reading Bohemian fairy tales all of a sudden?"
I want to tell her I had discovered my aunt's ancient "Fairytales From All Over the World", which I had spent the last four days reading, ditching my blog, my editing work and all the other things I usually do, but instead I shrug.
"Are you OK?" She asks.
I smile, say, "I am," and lead the way to Jamal's Café, where we meet every Monday evening, watching the ladders burn and the buildings turn to pink owing to the brightness of the ritual. We can smell a certain salty air of the sea, and sometimes, we hear the cries of a child. Emma closes her eyes when that happens.
When Emma's kid was told to climb a ladder on fire, the brave kid did it with zero objection. Emma was crying, protesting the futility of the ritual, of everything for that matter. With mascara smudged eyes, she begged Father to let her kid go, that it was "stupid" to have a kid go up and down a levitating, burning ladder to please God. "And what God?" She questioned Father, with an effrontery only a mother whose kid's performing a suicide ritual can possess.
Five hundred years ago, when pictures of my forefathers hanging out in dance clubs would not haveseemed otherworldly, when we still WhatsApped each other about our late night insecurities, when we weren't living by the sea, and the sun wasn't always settling down, Dhaka was a pretty different place. It wasn't even anywhere near the sea then. You could count all the roses the under-aged girls sold on the streets while stuck in traffic for hours. Now if we sight a car, it's considered a lucky day and we pray to God because we know it is by His grace that we encountered this vehicle, that it was He who wanted the rest of our day to be permeated with laughter, with a temporal "joy" so rare now, as if there was a time it wasn't.
The ritual Emma's kid participated in started sometime then. God made a ladder levitate. He made it burn with fire downloaded from hell. "The fire, it is known, had been washed in Heaven's lake 70 times and still it was pitch black!" Father had said. The day Emma's kid died, the fire was peachy orange.
God and his people formatted us. Well, almost. Some of our forefathers remained, as residue, bearing all our embarrassments and stupidity and eccentricity on their foreheads. Emma once said, "You know, I'm not saying I don't 'believe', it's just that maybe this thing, this magical ladder materializing and burning up only, only when a child is trying to climb it, maybe it's something to do with science." But we are poor people living on welfare; we are in no position to argue with Father. When God has too much children and too little resources, He does not commit the beautiful act of suicide, Father explains this to us, He has His children do it.